The long history of how Jesus came to resemble a white European
As a European
Renaissance art historian, I study the evolving image of Jesus Christ from
A.D. 1350 to 1600. Some of the best-known depictions of Christ, from Leonardo da Vinci’s
“Last Supper” to Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel, were
produced during this period. But the all-time
most-reproduced image of Jesus comes from another period. It is Warner Sallman’s light-eyed, light-haired “Head of Christ” from
1940. Sallman, a former commercial artist who created art for advertising
campaigns, successfully marketed this picture worldwide.
Sallman’s painting culminates a long tradition of white Europeans creating and dissemi-nating pictures of Christ made in their own image. The historical Jesus likely had the brown eyes and skin of other first-century Jews from Galilee, a region in biblical Israel. But no one knows exactly what Jesus looked like. There are no known images of Jesus from his lifetime, and while the Old Testament Kings Saul and David are explicitly called tall and handsome in the Bible, there is little indication of Jesus’ appearance in the Old or New Testaments....
